Gerardo Yépiz Velázquez (born October 3, 1970) is a Mexican

graphic artist A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, p ...

. He launched the first Mexican

Mail Art Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It initially developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence Schoo ...

website in 1995, and became known for his downloadable stencils, which set a model for young artists, and used street installation and graffiti as a critical forum. He also goes by the name " Acamonchi", a slang term for piggyback riding in northern Mexico. Acamonchi began his career in the mid-1980s as part of a cross-cultural underground scene in southern California and northern Mexico that was heavily influenced by fanzines and the

skate punk Skate punk (also known as skatecore and skate rock) is a skater subculture and punk rock subgenre that developed in the 1980s. Originally a form of hardcore punk that had been closely associated with skate culture, skate punk evolved into a mo ...

countercultures. His early work focused on images of the Mexican television host Raul Velasco and assassinated presidential candidate

Luis Donaldo Colosio Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta (; 10 February 1950 – 23 March 1994) was a Mexican politician, economist, and Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) presidential candidate, who was assassinated at a campaign rally in Tijuana during the Mexic ...

. According to Acamonchi, Velasco represents the mindless entertainment provided by the Mexican media. He describes Colosio—shot on live television in 1994, during a campaign rally in

Tijuana Tijuana ( ,"Tijuana"
(US) and < ...

—as the Mexican equivalent to

John F. Kennedy John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK and the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination i ...

. Colosio's face is a poignant reminder of political corruption and Tijuana's notorious outlaw reputation, but Acamonchi makes his point by mixing the image of Colosio with one of Colonel Sanders. Since then, he has created images for the

Nortec Collective Nortec Collective was a musical ensemble formed by various individual one- or two-man production projects. The group came together in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Their genre mixes electronic music with musical elements and instrumentation o ...

. He works in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

. and was artist

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yepiz, Gerardo Mexican artists Living people 1970 births